The Second Sex (book review)

Reading this now, in 2025, was like visiting a site where something astonishing was built some 75 years ago, something that goes on challenging readers even as the terms of that challenge shift and diverge. Simone de Beauvoir didn’t invent feminism. What she did achieve was arguably more difficult.  She built a durable political issue. It’s a weighty, scholarly book with the structure of an academic argument, the scope and depth that only an exceptionally well-educated person would even conceive of writing. It took a writer with a broad spectrum of curiosities, willing to examine a topic from a very wide range of perspectives, for The Second Sex considers “woman” from the standpoints of contemporary biology, history, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, theology at the time of writing (first published  1949). Beyond that, it took a woman with long, direct experience of “second-ness” to recognise the issue and appreciate it’s scale, its political, social and deeply personal implications. It took a person of exceptional confidence to insist that it could and should be “framed” in a book.

My own experience of reading this now, in my 70s (I can’t be sure whether I was reading for the first time or not.) was not especially uplifting or reassuring, but rather sobering, bracing, perhaps disillusioning. I had expected it to seem pretty distant,  ghostly, translucent, barely recognizable, but it does not. De Beauvoir’s main premise, that women have always been forced to occupy a secondary position in the world, less than or different from a “standard,” or usual or normal or accepted human, has met some outright rejection. The Vatican, tellingly, banned it. But the book’s more characteristic reception has been a lively critique of the structuring terms — the term “woman” in particular — and a wide range of efforts to expand, intensify, and transpose the idea of an unequal power maintained by means of cultural practice. Her much-quoted contention that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman” (295), for example, contains the basic distinction between sex (biological) and gender (cultural) that is now very widely acknowledged, substantiated in Judith Butler’s pioneering study  Gender Trouble of 1990. In short, much as been added and remodelled in the framework left by de Beauvoir. And yet much remains in place as well: the depth and scope of the structure, the clarity and precision of verbal expression, the core perception of a power differential maintained culturally, through patterns and practices. To the extent a reader recognises in it something of her own immediate experience, it continues to provide a benchmark, a scaffold in which to climb or contemplate, a set of provocative questions.